A bird’s-eye view of ESO

This aerial photograph shows the sprawling site of the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany. While ESO operates telescopes scattered across Chile in the southern hemisphere, Garching houses the scientific, technical and administrative centre of ESO, where development programmes are carried out to provide the observatories with the most advanced instruments.

The buildings in the centre of the frame, both with sleek, curved designs, are the two main ESO Headquarters buildings — the top-right building was the organisation’s sole base for many years before it was recently joined by the lower red-roofed extension, which was inaugurated in December 2013. The black, rounded building is the technical building, where work on new instruments is carried out. Each of the individual Headquarters buildings are connected by curved bridges, seen here as the three-armed black shape in the centre of the frame.

The new extension, designed by architects Auer+Weber, now helps to house ESO’s growing numbers of staff and to facilitate world-class astronomical research in the design and construction phase of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), the world’s biggest eye on the sky. Previously, some members of staff were spread across the Garching campus and housed in buildings similar to the white blocks seen to the left of this image.

This aerial image was taken on 9 June 2014 by aerial photographer Ernst Graf (graf-flugplatz.de).